him, harder than she’d intended. “Cool? That’s all?”
“That’s all. You have a plan, I like it, I’ll roll with it.”
She couldn’t let the unspoken contrast rest. “And you don’t. Have a plan.”
“I don’t. Can you roll with that?”
She thought about her classmates, looking for the summer internship that would lead to the associate offer that would put them on a partnership track. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was being a snob in reverse. But she didn’t want one of those men. Nothing was more boring than intensity without imagination.
* * *
They went to Philly for the internship, came back for third year. Still he wouldn’t talk about his family. He deflected her every time she tried to ask. She started to wonder if his dad was even alive. Then, October, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
A gravelly voice, a smoker’s voice, an old man’s voice. “Bri there?”
“He’ll be back shortly.” He was out for a run.
“This Rebecca?”
She wondered how this stranger knew her name. “Who’s this?”
“It’s his dad.” Pause. “Jerry.” As if he might have another dad. “Could you tell him I said hello?”
“Of course, Mr. Unsworth, my pleasure. Will I ever get to meet you?”
“That’s up to my son.” Then he was gone.
Somehow she waited until Brian showered and dried himself off before jumping him with the call.
“My dad? You talk to him?”
“Not really, no. It sounded like he wanted to talk to you.”
“Forget it, Becks.”
“Why won’t you talk about him? Or to him?”
He laughed, hollow and bitter. His face reminded her of the way he’d looked in the nursing home after Gordon Hendricks died.
“Maybe he was fine before he went to Vietnam, I don’t know, I wasn’t alive, but he came back with a drinking problem and a heroin solution, that’s who he’s been ever since. He gets clean, but you can never trust him.”
“But if you tried to forgive him—not for him, for you.”
“For me? He’s got nothing for me. Most selfish person I ever met. You don’t get it. Everyone you know is basically decent.”
“Brian. I’m on your side.”
He’d turned away from her, letting her know the conversation was over.
Again his coldness unnerved her. Yet some part of her respected him for his unwillingness to compromise his own anger.
Wow. She must really be in love.
* * *
They married not even a year later, spring break of her third year. Nothing fancy. A quick wedding in Boston, dinner with her family. Her idea more than Brian’s, a way to handle the fact that his family wouldn’t be there. Her friend Jane officiated, a quasi-civil ceremony. Rebecca didn’t care. Her mom was Jewish and her dad Catholic. They both regarded religion more as an inconvenience than anything else.
As for the wedding itself, she’d already gone to enough friends’ weddings to be over them. She didn’t have the time or energy to pick the right band, the right venue, the right dress. They would have had to do it on the cheap, too, because her parents didn’t have fifty thousand dollars lying around, and Brian certainly couldn’t ask his dad. Grandpa Jerome was giving her ten thousand dollars as a wedding present. Only one rule, Becks, you have to spend it, can’t put it against your law school loans. For ten grand they could have a lousy wedding or a great honeymoon.
Okay, sure, some part of her wouldn’t have minded walking down the aisle in a perfect white dress. Having her dad give her away. The vision was manufactured, what she’d been sold her whole life. But she couldn’t deny it held a certain surface appeal.
She asked Brian what he thought, but he was no help. She had begun to see that he considered displays of emotion—even private displays—contrived. Almost shameful. His vision of masculinity came straight out of a John Ford Western. Tight-lipped, straight-backed. Of course, that attitude was what had helped attract her to him in the first place. But sometimes she wished he’d tell her how he felt.
“We can do it however you like,” he said.
“Maybe a chance to get all your friends together.” In the year they’d been together, she’d met only one of his friends, a squirrelly guy named Jimmy who’d slept on their couch for a couple of days before vanishing. Afterward, Rebecca realized he’d filched the money from her purse. Brian hadn’t even looked surprised when she told him.
“Not exactly the fancy wedding type, my friends.”
“So whatever I want.”
“I don’t care about the wedding, Becks. I care about the girl.”